Mobile handsets required to support Hindi, English & one Indian official language

Bureau of Indian Standards, BIS, an Indian governing body for standards in the country is pushing Indian regional languages as the mandatory package in smartphones sold in India. In a statement issued as reported by Livemint, BIS wants all mobile handsets in India to have the facility to read in all 22 official Indian languages and have input capability for three languages – Hindi, English, and one official Indian language.

While it’s not that hard to explain why BIS would be pushing these requirements, but it’s quite hard to indulge in a fact that the government body wants this to be offered in every handset as a pre-installed thing. While on the other hand consumers don’t like and feels that the bloatware is most of the waste of resources of the system. And it does nothing but slows down the system.

This push comes under the Digital India Initiative by the Indian government, as the core agenda of it is to create digital infrastructure and deliver services digitally, as well as literate Indian population about the Digital know-how.

With Google already pushing its Indic Keyboard having support of all official Indian languages make it quite easier for certain millions of users to type in their regional languages. While talking about reading system settings and everything in Indic languages, well, Google also offers that for but certain Indian languages only. The Mountain View giant has already identified the potential of this language support, as they have set up a body to work in offering an accurate translation of the system settings in other Indian languages.

Though, note that BIS is pushing this not only for smartphones but feature phones as well. According to a letter, the proposed specification required for all features to have minimum 4MB of memory, out of which 2MB should be reserved for Indian language support. These specifications are applicable to all mobile handsets, but they do no impact smartphone devices as they offer adequate memory, may it be Android and Apple mobile platforms.

It will be an easy job to implement this for Smartphones, while not so much for feature phones. What do you guys think about it? Should Indian languages be mandatory on all mobile phones? Shoot your feedback in the comments section below.